Thursday, July 24, 2014

The World Meteorological Organization’s Commission
for Climatology had its four-yearly meeting in Heidelberg, Germany, from 3-8
July, preceded by a Technical Conference from 30 June – 2 July. The Commission
is the central body for climate-related activities in WMO, and has a major role
in establishing international standards and setting international work programs
in the climate field, particularly through setting up networks of Expert Teams
and Task Teams to work on particular issues. ItsPresident (re-elected at the meeting) is Tom
Peterson of NCDC, who will be well-known to many of you. The International
Surface Temperature Initiative was set up as the result of a resolution of the
last Commission for Climatology meeting, in 2010.

I made a presentation to the Technical Conference
on the current status of ISTI. By happy coincidence, this presentation was
scheduled for the morning on 1 July, a few hours after the release of the first
version of the ISTI databank. The presentation appeared to be well-received;
there were few direct questions or follow-ups, but the pile of leaflets we
brought describing ISTI (once they got there, after a couple of bonus days
enjoying Berlin with the rest of my luggage) was a lot smaller at the end of
the week than it was at the start. One particular reason for targeting the
Commission audience is that many of the attendees at Commission meetings are
senior managers in their national meteorological services (often the head of
the climate division, or equivalent), and so potentially have more influence
over decisions to make data available to projects such as ISTI than individual
scientists would.

Slow progress is also being made in two other areas
of WMO of interest to ISTI. The inclusion of at least some historic climate data
amongst the set of products which countries agree to freely exchange has been a
long-standing goal of ours. The key decisions on this will be made at the full
WMO Congress, which will be held next year, but progress to date (including
through the recent WMO Executive Council meeting) is encouraging. There are
also moves to include the month’s daily data in monthly CLIMAT messages, which
are the principal means of exchanging current climate data through the WMO
system but currently only contain monthly data. This will be very useful for
the ongoing updating of data sets, as it will make daily data available which
can be assumed to be for a full 24-hour day and is likely to have received at
least some quality control (neither of which is necessarily true for the
real-time synoptic reports which are the primary current source of recent daily
and sub-daily data). Considerable technical work remains to be done, though, to
implement this, even once it is formally endorsed.

Data rescue and climate database systems continue
to be a high priority of the Commission, with several initiatives outlined at
the meeting. Among them are proposals for an international data rescue portal,
which (among other things) would potentially facilitate crowd-sourced
digitisation. It is, however, an indication of how much work still remains to
be done in many parts of the world that, according to results of a survey
reported at the meeting, 25% of responding countries still stored their
country’s climate data in spreadsheets or flat files, and 40% had a climate
database system which was not fully functioning or not functioning at all.

The Commission also agreed to establish a new Task
Team on Homogenisation. The full membership (and chairing) of this group are
not yet clear but I will almost certainly be part of it. This team will be
working closely with ISTI, but will also have a major focus on supporting the
implementation of homogenised data sets which contribute to operational data
products nationally and internationally.

Also of interest to ISTI is a new WMO initiative to
formally recognise “centennial stations”, which, as the name implies, are
stations which have existed with few or no changes for 100 years or more.
Countries are to be asked to identify such stations, whose data will clearly be
of considerable value to ISTI, if not already part of our databank. Free access
to data and relevant metadata are among the recommendations for centennial
stations.

And one advantage of holding an international
meeting during the World Cup: it provides an instant conversation-starter with
delegates of almost any country. (Perhaps fortunately for the Brazilian
delegation, the meeting finished just before the semi-finals).

(Update 5 August: the resolution which came out of the WMO Executive Council meeting is available at

We hope to have a meeting report out within a matter of days to weeks. We will post this here.

Overall there was a lot of active participation and many new directions to be taken in the analysis of surface temperatures. Our thanks go out to both SAMSI and IMAGe for facilitating this meeting and to all the participants for being active. More details to appear soon ...